First we start with a cute picture of Stella. We had one of our parent’s dinners this weekend, and we attempted to put a barrette in Stella’s hair. I really like barrettes and I think it looks great. It’s velcro though, and has the staying power, of, well… putting velcro in your hair. Very good if you want something hanging oddly off of your head, as though you had fallen asleep on some children’s toys and not looked in a mirror when you awoke. Not so good if you want it to look nice. But hey, Julie got a great picture.

Yesterday Julie suggested we take Stella out to the Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve. I brought the jogging stroller along, not really knowing what to expect. Turns out they don’t allow bikes, so I figured that would include jogging strollers. I put Stella in her Baby Bjoern and we were off. Seeing as how this is me, we ended up not taking a map. The scale of the map we did look at seemed way off. The park is pretty small. Only 2.5 miles of trails total. We ended up heading down to the waterfall (that didn’t really exist due to our current drought conditions), then hiked up the other side of the basin. At this point I think Julie was sensing that she was in for one of my death marches. The steps were really steep. I don’t know if they were put in by very tall people, or what.

We wandered around a more rough trail, and then ended back up in the basin, where we saw a wild rabbit. Super cute. We spent about 5 minutes trying to very, very, very quietly point it out to Stella. She eventually saw it, and made one of her shrieking sounds. Which oddly enough did not scare off the rabbit. Although it may have thought she was a bird of prey and was staying very still to stay invisible. We headed back up the other side of the basin, for some incredible views. It’s a pretty amazing panorama from up there. We headed up even further back onto the easy access path and back to the car. All in all, less than a 1 hour walk, but really nice an relaxing. I highly recommend it, especially this time of year when it’s nice to be outside.